Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (29 page)

On the night in question we went to bed about 11 pm and fell asleep.
However, I was roughly awakened, feeling that my life was being choked out of my body.
Although I couldn’t see anyone in the darkness, I suffered the terrible sensation of being strangled and could actually feel someone—something—exerting a vice-like grip around my throat, so much that I was forced back into the pillow.
It was not a nightmare.
I was fully awake, but unable to scream.
I shook my husband from what seemed a trance-like slumber.
He immediately switched on the light, and although we couldn’t see anyone in the room, the temperature had dropped considerably.
I was unable to utter a word for several minutes .
.
.
[I don’t know] whether it was because I am slightly psychic that the presence was drawn to me.
I only know that I could sense evil in that house.

Her husband, like Mrs.
Billingham’s, never experienced anything unusual, but “did witness the extremely disturbing effects on his wife, daughter and grandchild.”

Reading this account, I was reminded of Diane Pritchard’s experiences with the Black Monk.
The fall in temperature, the sense of a presence in the room, all sound more like a poltergeist than a normal “haunting.” I obtained Mrs.
Billingham’s new address from the
Leicester Mercury
and wrote to her, asking if she could tell me more about the experiences that drove her out of the house.
She replied that it had all been so horrible that she had no desire to talk about it—she merely wanted to forget it.

In an article called “Gremlins at the Gates of Dawn,” Paul Devereux, editor of
The Ley Hunter
,
[6]
writes:

It has been noted by earth mystery researchers from time to time that things often seem to go wrong when ancient sites are being investigated: to use a romantic notion, as if some invisible guardian of a site is making things difficult for the human investigators.
Cameras inexplicably jam, accidents happen, people are taken ill.
An example happened to your editor in an aircraft over Wandlebury Camp .
.
.
an expensive, newish camera internally fell apart at the precise moment when infra-red pictures of the Gog Magog figures [first discovered by Lethbridge] were to be taken.
Yet the camera had functioned perfectly before take-off.

And the article goes on to describe at length all kinds of mishaps that accompanied a trip to photograph the winter solstice sunrise at the Castle Rigg stone circle in Cumbria.

The travel writer Laurens Van der Post describes a similar incident in book
The Lost World of the Kalahari
, when his expedition, seeking the vanished bushmen of South Africa, approached a place called the Slippery Hills.
Their guide, Samutchoso, had insisted that there should be no shooting of game as they approached, or the gods would be angry.
Van der Post had forgotten to tell the advance party, and they shot a wart-hog, to Samutchoso’s alarm.
From then on, everything went wrong.
They were attacked by wild bees, and all stung.
When a movie camera was focused on a rock-painting, it promptly jammed, although the magazine was new.
They loaded another magazine, it jammed again.
The same thing happened to a third magazine.
In a natural amphitheatre, Samutchoso knelt to pray, but was pulled violently backwards, tearing both his knees.
The advance party returned to camp to collect more magazines; these all jammed just as promptly.
At dawn they were invaded by more bees.
And as soon as they began to try to film again, the camera jammed, and continued to do so for the rest of the day.
Their tape recorder simply went dead.
The next day, it was the same story all over again, from the dawn attack by bees.
A steel swivel of a camera—so reliable that no spare was carried—also failed.

Finally, Samutchoso offered to consult the spirits by a traditional method, in which a needle was placed along the lifeline on the palm of his hand, and he stared into it.
As Van der Post and the party watched, they heard a one-way conversation, during which Samutchoso broke off periodically to listen to the spirits.
Finally, Samutchos told Van der Post: “It is as I thought, the spirits of the hills are very angry with you, so angry that if they had not known your intention in coming here was pure they would long since have killed you.
They are angry because you have come with blood on your hands.”

Van der Post thought of an expedient to placate the spirits; he wrote a note of humble apology, made everyone sign it, and buried it in a ledge.
Then Samutchoso again consulted the spirits, and told Van der Post that all would now be well.
The spirits also warned him that he would find bad news at the next place he went to; in fact, he learned that his father had died.

Samutchoso’s experience when trying to pray sounds like what happened to Lethbridge on Skellig Michael when something threw him on his face.
And this in turn suggests that what Lethbridge encountered was not, strictly speaking, a poltergeist, but some kind of “elemental.” (This does not, of course, preclude the possibility that poltergeists
are
some kind of elemental.)

In Africa, the reality of spirits is taken for granted, and many white men who have had experience of Africa have also learned to accept their reality.
In
Ju-ju in My Life
, James H.
Neal, former chief investigation officer for the Government of Ghana, tells of his own first acquaintance with spirits.
A port was being built at Tema, and a small tree defied all efforts to move it—even bulldozers were unable to tear it out of the ground.
The African foreman explained that it was a fetich—was inhabited by a spirit, and that a fetich priest would have to be called.
The priest asked for three sheep, three bottles of gin, and a hundred pounds if he succeeded.
The blood of the sheep was sprinkled around the tree, then the gin; then the priest went into a trance and begged the spirit to vacate it for a more suitable home.
After various rituals, the priest announced that the spirit had agreed to leave.
A small team of men then pulled the tree out with a rope.

Another psychical researcher, Leonard Boucher (whom we shall meet again in chapter Seven), has a similar story about a tree in Tema, near Accra, Ghana.
When plans were drawn up for the construction of a new hotel, it was decided that an old tree would have to be cut down—otherwise, it would impede the view from the lounge window.
The tree had been a meeting place of ju-ju men over centuries, and the local ju-ju man informed the builders that it would be impossible to cut it down—it was the dwelling place of the spirit of an ancient chief.
The management ignored him, and told the builders to go ahead and remove it.
But this proved to be more difficult than expected.
Saws broke, men manning the bulldozer became ill, the ground hardened like concrete and, after all their efforts, the tree still remained intact.
Finally, African workers on the site refused to make any further attempt to destroy the tree—it is still to be seen today outside the middle of the lounge picture window.

In the appendix of my book
Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs
, I have printed a story told to me by a friend, Martin Delany, who was managing director of a company in Nigeria.
A hen flew into the saw of a Brenta band-saw and was cut to pieces, and the Nigerian workers were alarmed, declaring that the god was angry, and would have to be appeased with blood.
Martin refused, because it involved the sacrifice of a puppy dog.
Two days later, another hen flew into the blade.
When the saw began to cut unevenly, it was stopped and the electricity turned off at the main.
As soon as the manager began to examine it, the blade turned and almost severed his hand.
Engineers who examined the saw said it was an impossibility.
Finally, the saw blade began to “strip” when in use, and the ball of tangled metal killed the operator.
At this point, Martin Delany allowed the witch doctor to make the sacrifice; and all trouble immediately ceased.
From the point of view of the present chapter, the main interest of the story is the way that the saw began to turn even when switched off at the main.
We have already noted that poltergeists seem to have the power to create electric currents.

But stories of curses are as common to England as to Africa.
I know of a village in Cornwall where no one dares to touch a rather dangerous yew in a churchyard because there is a belief that anyone who does so will die, and this is what happened to the last man who tried to cut it down.
Usually, in such cases, there is a story of a curse laid by a witch.
In
The Folklore of Cornwall
, Tony Deane and Tony Shaw mention that there are two fields in Cornwall that are never tilled because they are cursed.
One is at Mullion, the other at Padstow.
The latter is at Lower Harlyn Farm, now farmed by a Mr.
Bennett.
The “curse” was laid in the nineteenth century when a cargo of pilchards was dumped in the field; the Italian buyers refused to purchase them because they were too expensive.
The villagers were starving, but were refused permission to touch the pilchards.
A witch named Mother Ivey cursed the field (presumably to discomfort the farmer), saying that if anyone tried to plough it, the eldest son would die.
When an eldest son was thrown from his horse and killed in the field, there were no further attempts at ploughing.
But during the Second World War, the Home Guard dug trenches in it.
The eldest son—the present owner’s father—was killed shortly afterwards.
The owner, a Mr.
Hellyar, has said in an article that he would need a very good reason for trying to cultivate the field.
Mrs.
Mary Rees, the joint owner of the field, has attempted to break the curse by burying rags in a tin—obtained from a witch—in the field; but Mr.
Bennett, the tenant farmer, refuses to be convinced.

chapter V of Conan Doyle’s
Coming of the Fairies
is called “Observations of a Clairvoyant in the Cottingley Glen, August 1921.” The clairvoyant was a man named Geoffrey Hodson, a member of the Theosophical Society.
In their Yorkshire Television interview, Elsie and Frances indicate that they regarded him as a “phoney”; yet this is hardly borne out by his books.
Still, both Elsie and Frances insist they did see fairies with Hodson, even though they exaggerated what they saw to pull his leg.
(They add, interestingly, that they never saw fairies again after this.) In 1952, Hodson published a small book called
Fairies at Work and Play
, introduced by Edward Gardner, the man who “discovered” Elsie and Frances.
Gardner explains the traditional “occult”’ belief that man possesses an “astral body,” which can leave the physical body under certain circumstances—a matter we shall discuss in a later chapter.
The astral body is said to be made of matter at a higher rate of vibration than physical matter.
The human aura—a kind of energy that interpenetrates the human body—also seems to belong to this realm.
According to Gardner, fairies and other such elementals belong on this level.
Clairvoyants are able to see or sense this realm of vibrations which, according to Gardner, explains how Elsie and Frances could see fairies.
One of the purposes of fairies, or nature spirits (sometimes called devas, a Hindu word) is to aid the growth of plants and seeds, hence their association with the woodland and open countryside and their absence in built-up areas.
According to Gardner:

None of the fairies, gnomes nor higher devas, can be said to have a fixed “solid” body, as we understand the term.
They may occasionally materialize,
often using as the basis of this “materialization” the thoughtforms that peasants and children have built of them.
[my italics]

The latter comment seems to explain why Marc Alexander’s friend saw an English pixie in New Zealand.
“The elemental life rejoices to jump into a ready-made thought-form as much as an active child delights in dressing up.” He adds that the natural form of elementals seems to be a “pulsing globe of light.”

Hodson’s book certainly provides the skeptic with plenty of material for satirical comment: brownies who affect a medieval style of attire, gnomes of “grotesque appearance, cadaverous and lantern-jawed,” and black or peat brown in color; undines—water sprites—who are beautiful nude females, about six inches long, and Manx fairies with “soft and dreamy eyes.” Yet his descriptions correspond closely to dozens of others on record.
His description of a “crimson nature deva” is impressive: